Fast Sundays 6: Natural Xanax

Day 42/365: Careful! It’s addictive…

Fast Sundays: Every Sunday, I write a 300 words post on different topics of interest, after starring at the blank laptop screen for 3 minutes. Whatever pops into my mind at the end of the 3 minutes mark, that’s what I’ll scribble below.

For my Psychology course, I talk a lot with an actual therapist, a great friend of mine who did amazingly in school and is now a renowned psychotherapist focusing on CBT. She helped me a ton with my studies, but also with giving me tips on how to defend myself from my own demons, which is always useful when you have a job, school and bills to pay.

Probably the most amazing advice that she’d given me is the one about what she calls “natural Xanax”. In Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, therapists focus on relieving the pain, sort of speak, by reconditioning the brain into thinking more rational, to face the fears that block the client and to release the symptoms of whatever it is that the client suffers from, be it anxiety, depression, phobias of OCD.

CBT is a hard thing to go through because it involves a lot of persistence and determination. If you’re not willing to work on yourself and get better in a natural way, then you can go to a psychiatrist, but get ready for months or even years of medication with all sorts of extremely-not-funny side effects.

If you want to relieve stress, anxiety and even depression by naturally reconditioning your brain, you can simply take one “natural Xanax” every time when you feel overwhelmed.

What is a natural Xanax?

Natural Xanax is any type of exercise that involves putting on some shoes and getting out of your house. Walking works great, but you need a lot of it to actually feel better. High-intervals running is amazing, but it requires you to have good resilience and great lungs capacity to get it right. The best “natural Xanax” that you can “take” is jogging.

Chemically, jogging is doing the same stuff to your brain as a Xanax would do. It allows you to feel great after you’re doing it, and if you’re a regular jogger, the benefits are more and more powerful with each session. You don’t need a lot of it, “small dosages” work, as 30 minutes per day will do the trick, but the rewards are amazing.

My friend told me that she had patients going from being terribly anxious and afraid of doing stuff to almost having no anxiety whatsoever, just after a month of consistent, easy and relaxed jogging.

Moreover, there are no awful side effects as they’d be if you’d be taking the drug and the transformations in your brain, chemically speaking, are basically the same.

So the next time you’re feeling a little (or a lot) low, scared about the next job interview, flight or date, put on your shoes, go for a good jogging session and test the “natural Xanax” for yourself.

Careful! It’s addictive…

Thank you for your time!

My name is Gabriel Iosa, I’m a 25 years old travel enthusiast, food lover, Psychology student, Full-time Freelancer, writer and Instagram fanatic. You can follow me @gabrieliosa, and if you liked this post, give it exactly 45 claps!

I’m on a mission to write 365 articles in 2018. This is definitely the biggest writing challenge of my life so far. If you’d like to be part of the journey, please follow me here on Medium.com for the daily posts!